Silicon Labs' IoT SoC Gambit

In fact, CMEMS appears to possess all the qualities necessary for IoT SoCs, including long operating life and stability over an industry temperature range. Most importantly, it's a highly integrated, single-chip solution.

Tyson Tuttle, Silicon Labs CEO, in Shanghai.

When asked how soon more complex MEMS such as gyroscopes might fit into CMEMS, Tuttle said, in essence, not so fast.

"The primary focus of Silicon Labs' CMEMS technology investment has been to replace the need for quartz-based resonators in a variety of timing applications," he said. "While CMEMS is applicable to sensor products, it is not our current focus."

The technology "has the potential to expand our growing family of sensor products, and it would be natural fit with our wireless and MCU capabilities." However, "It would be premature to discuss potential product vectors in this area."

Sensor hubs in IoT SoC?
Silicon Labs acknowledges that there is still a long way to go before realizing the single-chip IoT SoC.

"A wrist-worn device like a FitBit, JawBone, MisFit or Basis wearable already embodies the IoT SoC concept," Daniel Cooley, the company's senior marketing director for MCU and wireless products, told us. "The only problem is that there are too many chips in wearables and other connected devices right now."

Cooley defined the IoT SoC as "the only processor in the connected device system," including multi-core Cortex-A, GHz clocks, and GB of memory. "Critically, the IoT SoC [must] have wireless connectivity embedded inside of it." Sensor hub functions also need to be a part of the picture. "The IoT SoC will have to fuse all of the sensor inputs in a smart way, because local processing is so much more efficient than sending raw data over a wireless network."

That will be no easy feat. No sensor hub discussed today has wireless connectivity. No chip company has integrated all the key functions into one piece of silicon, Cooley said. Not many companies can integrate MCU, RF, sensors, power management, and memory.

But therein lies Silicon Labs' IoT SoC mission. In Cooley's mind, the IoT SoC of the future will include the "sensor hub" function, integrate wireless connectivity, and control human interfaces (buttons, slides, screens, LEDs, and others). Though he called it a huge engineering task, he is confident that the Energy Micro products and technologies acquired by Silicon Labs "can do all of this and more."

Besides the block diagram, one of the interesting parts of my conversation with Silicon Labs was their view of "sensor hubs" and how that relates to their vision of IoT SoC.

While Silicon Labs' current focus is not exactly in gathering and integrating multiple types of sensors -- 3D sensors, 3G sensors, etc. -- into a hub, the company views the end game of IoT SoCs in performing sensor hub operations and wireless connectivity all together.

Didn't the mediatek chipset for wearables integrated everything ? it did this by integrating multiple dies, but mediatek can do this relatively cost effectively i believe. They have something using this kind of integration used in dumb phones ,being sold at $2.1 .

Congrats !! As usual, you came with a good point of discussion.SiLabs is trying to "pull the sardines to his side" , as we say in Brazil.In my current vision , this drawing is a kind of IOT Level 2. So there is at list one level below and several levels above. For example, Intel is "selling"the idea that IOT uses Edson, with a Pentium CPU inside. What we would call an IOT Level 4. And why not the cell phones are IOT also ? Why not IOT Level 6?So we are discovering that IOT is bigger and bigger, and we will have to start to classify them , linked to a certain groups of applications.

I taught VLSI class many years back...a picture like this was used by me (and many others) to illustrate concept of system on chip (SoC)...in some sense most complex ICs start to look like this (some blocks might be missing in some implementations) so I am not sure what is the fuss about ;-)

Again, IoT device needs to communicate so there has to be classification in terms of the 7 layers oif the standard protocol stuck...I am not really sure why you are trying to invent something special for IoT while teh fundation has been laid down a while back and can be found in every textbook on this topic...only implementation details will be different...Kris

I agree with Kris. There's no new principle at play here. If you want to define the functional layers involved in IoT, the 7 layer ISO/OSI model is just as good as any. I think the point of the article was to show how all 7 layers may be provided in a single chip.